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I shook my head.
“It’s Lucy, Juliette’s sister. Are you starting to get it now? Your girlfriend just ambushed my ninety-two-year-old mother with a painting of her dead niece.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “We didn’t know. I never knew...”
“Of course you didn’t know. Because it’s not something we talk about, as a family, even now. Lucy died, Patrick, when she was ten years old. She drowned in the lake, right here at Longhurst, in 1924. They were rowing to the island one summer afternoon, Lucy and her younger sister, Juliette, for a picnic, and the boat capsized. Juliette managed to swim back to shore. Lucy didn’t. That beautiful girl. Everyone’s darling. It was the great tragedy of the family, a sadness that engulfed everything for years. And she painted it. Juliette painted her sister, her beloved, much-missed, endlessly mourned sister. Without dignity. With mottled skin and blue lips. With floating hair. And then she put her on public display, for an audience of tittering gawkers. As if Juliette were the only person who remembered her. As if she alone spent the rest of her life trying to come to terms with her loss. As if the family had not had to deal with enough bloody scandals...”
He thrust the now-crumpled piece of paper back at me with a sneer of contempt. I could hear Harry’s grandmother being comforted by Georgina somewhere nearby. Harry’s father, shaking his head, made his way over to join them.
When I got back to the tent to find Caroline, to explain what a horrible mess we had made of everything, her chair was empty.
“The Curse of Longhurst Hall”—an extract from The World of the Unknown: Unsolved Mysteries (London: Usborne, 1981)
The disappearance of Jane Herries, the Missing Maid of Longhurst, was perhaps the perfect mystery for the new media age of the early 1930s. The unexplained and seemingly inexplicable vanishing of a strikingly pretty young woman from the picturesque country home of a famously wealthy and well-connected British MP, Cyril Willoughby.
The Daily Mail was the first paper to coin the nickname the “Missing Maid.” The Daily Mirror put a photograph of Jane Herries on their front cover three days in a row. As if it were a case for Hercule Poirot, newspapers printed maps of Longhurst, indicating the maid’s room and the last places she had been seen, itemizing the known itinerary of the final hours before she vanished.
It was Friday, September 15, 1933, when the last recorded sighting of Jane Herries occurred. Friday was her afternoon off, and after lunch in the servants’ hall she went upstairs, saying she had a letter to write. She did not say to whom. That evening, when she failed to appear for dinner, several other servants realized they had not seen her for hours and decided to investigate. They went to her little attic room, and it was empty. No letter. A cold cup of tea sat on her bedside table. Her clothes and belongings were undisturbed. Nothing appeared to be missing other than Jane Herries herself.
She had not returned by the time the rest of the household began turning in, gradually, for the night. She had not returned by the next morning, when the police were first alerted.
By midday they had contacted her sister, Helen, in Bristol, who had neither heard from her nor seen her. The sisters, orphans, had no other living relatives. Nor was Jane Herries’s sister aware of any other friend or acquaintance with whom she might be staying, or any reason why she might so abruptly have left Longhurst, where she had been working for several months. At no time had Jane expressed anything other than satisfaction with her post, Helen reported. As evidence of this, she presented to the police several examples—later reprinted in the press—of the weekly letters Jane would send her, written and posted every Friday, without fail.
No letter from September 15 ever arrived. Nor did any of the household—who recalled often seeing Jane Herries walking up the drive of Longhurst to deliver her weekly letter to the postbox—report her doing so on that particular Friday.
On the afternoon of Saturday, September 16, the Willoughby family—Cyril Willoughby, his wife, Diana, his daughter Juliette—joined the rest of the household in searching the grounds for Jane. The upper and lower lawns; the rose garden; the island; the woods around the lake; the summerhouse; the winter and summer stables; the meadow. They searched the house, upstairs and down. The attics. The cellars. They found no sign of her.
It is a mile walk from the house to the gates of Longhurst. From there, the nearest bus stop was a walk (along the roadside) of at least another ten minutes. The nearest train station was a fifteen-minute drive. None of the bus drivers interviewed by the police recalled picking up Jane Herries that day. No one matching her description was seen at the train station.
For a time, the assumption was that Herries had eloped with a sweetheart who had met her at a prearranged rendezvous point. However, nobody interviewed by the police knew of any such sweetheart, or had ever heard her mention one. Jane’s sister described the idea as preposterous. Nor could it be explained how she could have left Longhurst undetected, or why she would have done so without a single one of her possessions.
For weeks, the newspapers reported supposed sightings of Jane Herries. Boarding a ship to New York, in Liverpool. In a restaurant with a gentleman in Bath. Reading about herself in a newspaper in a Lyons tea shop in Piccadilly.
None of these sightings was ever substantiated.
Then the rumors darkened.
A theory was advanced—her sister denied it vociferously, in multiple interviews—that there had been a secret lover, and that Jane Herries had been pregnant, and that either she or he had done something rash. The Daily Express published a front-page story that quoted a well-known celebrity spiritualist claiming that Herries’s disappearance, like the tragic death by drowning of Cyril Willoughby’s elder daughter a decade earlier, was related to an ancient curse associated with one of the items in Cyril’s collection of Egyptian artifacts.
In November 1933, Cyril Willoughby announced that he was offering a £500 reward for anyone coming forward with any information about the whereabouts of his former employee, or any information about the events leading up to her disappearance. The reward money was never claimed.
Eventually, other scandals, other sensations, the gathering clouds of the coming war, displaced the Missing Maid of Longhurst from the front pages.
The mystery remains unsolved.
Chapter 8
CAROLINE, LONGHURST, 1991
I was standing alone and shivering outside the tent, wondering where I could hide for the rest of the night, when I heard a cough. There was a pause, then another cough, slightly louder, definitely deliberate. I turned to see one of those boys from the table of nerds to which Patrick had directed my attention with a nudge and a wry smile earlier. He held one hand aloft, like I was a skittish animal who might bolt if he got too close.
“Are you okay, Caroline? You forgot this,” he said, holding up my shawl with the other hand. “It’s a little cold out here. I thought you might need it.”
Only when he took another step forward to hand it to me did I recognize him—it was Terry, the quiet computer science kid from the room next to Patrick’s in college. Next-Door Terry, we sometimes called him. It was a bit of a surprise he knew my name, to be honest. I think the most he and I had ever spoken was to say hello to each other as we passed on the stairs, a little awkward conversation in the kitchen as we waited for the kettle to boil.
He was wearing a dinner jacket with a wide velvet collar, much too large in the shoulders and short in the sleeves.
“Thank you,” I said, taking my shawl. “That’s very kind.”